[thelist] SVG versus Flash?

Richard Bennett richard.bennett at skynet.be
Thu Dec 6 06:39:44 CST 2001


hi,
----- Original Message -----
From: "Joergen Ramskov" <mqy4fxax36001 at sneakemail.com>
> Proprietary may not be the best word, but I still think it is important to
> know that Flash is a Macromedia product, SVG is an W3C recommendation.
This
> means that SVG probably will be supported directly in future browsers
(there
> is limited support in Mozilla already if you enable it), while Flash will
> forever need the Flash plugin.

I think this is a wrong assessment.
Firstly , there's nothing wrong with plugins - if we didn't have them, we'd
have 50meg browser installs. (oh, we do?)
Secondly, all extensible browser functionality is delivered through plugins.
Even VML is essentially a plugin, you just can't plug it "out".
MS is currently far ahead of Mozilla or others when it comes to plugins,
with their binary behavior technology. For IE at least all plugins can be
expected to use this technology before long.
PDF was never slowed down because it needed a plugin.

although a lot of companies helped setting up SVG (including MS) (see:
http://www.w3.org/TR/SVG/#AuthorList ) Microsoft has taken a step back, as
SVG/SMIL is too close to VML/TIME for them.
For That reason I don't see them including the SVG plugin (and thus creating
the illusion of native support) any time soon.

The future will lie with multiple namespace support in XML browsers. Already
you can do this in IE5.5+ (with a little hacking around) so you can combine
SVG, and other XML technologies, in a xhtml page.

I might add that the comparison SVG/Flash is not really ideal either - they
are complimentary technologies, I generally prefer SVG as you are not
distracted by the wysiwyg interface, and can code in a familiar context,
using DOM ECMA-script XML and CSS, but for some applications Flash is simply
faster and easier.

Cheers,
Richard





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